Wow. Has anyone heard about buffered writes ? And does kernel-level page cache ring a bell ? No fsync was ever used in the benchmarks, therefore, it is never actually hitting the disk. The only good thing about this paper is that the Java and Python listings are available at the end, for everyone to identify the basic flaws in this research.

So yeah, it's faster to write directly to MEMORY than to do a copy before writing to MEMORY.

compudj writes: Ever wondered why your program is experiencing spurious latencies ? This blog post about finding the root cause of a web request latency presents a new set of scripts, LTTng Analyses, which allows devops and developers to narrow down the root cause of those latencies, presenting statistics, frequency distribution, logs, and top usage of disk, network, CPU, memory, interrupts, and system calls to the console.

Just a random though: has anyone checked how long, and over what distance, the plane could fly from its cruise altitude once its engines stop ? If, in such a situation, the pilots tried something similar to what has been done with flight 1549 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/US_Airways_Flight_1549), it might be an interesting approach to try to approximate a circular search zone (rather than an area).

Hugh Pickens writes writes: "Alex Madrigal reports in the Atlantic that the ACLU has taken up the case of Maryland corrections officer Robert Collins who was required to provide his Facebook login and password to the Maryland Division of Corrections (DOC) during a recertification interview so the interviewer could log on to his account and read not only his postings, but those of his family and friends too. "We live in a time when national security is the highest priority, but it must be delicately balanced with personal privacy," says Collins. "My fellow officers and I should not have to allow the government to view our personal Facebook posts and those of our friends, just to keep our jobs." The ACLU of Maryland has sent a letter to Public Safety Secretary Gary Maynard (PDF) concerning the Division of Correction's blanket requirement that applicants for employment with the division, as well as current employees undergoing recertification, provide the government with their social media account usernames and personal passwords for use in employee background checks. After three weeks the ACLU has received no response."

Anonymous Coward writes: "On February 8, President Obama issued a decree that clamping down on IP and increasing spending on copyright cops would somehow stimulate the economy's creativity, so he created "Intellectual Property Enforcement Advisory Committees" of all the heads of our departments to do what they must to please the RIAA and MPAA. As usual, Biden was leading the charge.

From the article:"To ensure that the Administration does its best to protect these innovations and creative products, today the President issued this Executive Order, which establishes a Cabinet level Senior Intellectual Property Enforcement Advisory Committee comprised of the heads of the Departments responsible for intellectual property enforcement, including the Departments of Justice, Homeland Security, Commerce, Health and Human Services, State, Treasury, Agriculture and USTR. The Executive Order also establishes the Intellectual Property Enforcement Advisory Committee comprised of representatives from the agencies responsible for designing and carrying out the Administration’s strategy for stopping intellectual property theft."

So far, LTTng has been mainly integrated in embedded distros: WindRiver Linux, Montavista Linux and STLinux currently ship with LTTng. The interesting news that is particular about Ubuntu here is that, by installing the LTTng packages from PPA, it is now possible to easily deploy the LTTng kernel and userspace tracers on a desktop-oriented distribution.

The K42 project at IBM Research investigated the benefit of a complete OS rewrite with scalability to very large SMP systems in mind. This is an open source operating system supporting Linux-compatible API and ABI.

Their target systems, "next generation SMP systems", back in 2003 seems to have become the current generation of SMP/multi-core systems in the meantime.